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And especially, Samsung UE510 LED DISPLAY Monitor, Black, 28" 4K (Certified Refurbished).

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BONUS: Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

At Amazon, Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition).

Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Ayn Rand, We the Living

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Ayn Rand, We the Living (75th-Anniversary Edition).

Ayn Rand, Capitalism

At Amazon, Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Mass Market Paperback).

The Most Politically Dangerous Book

It's Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

The most politically dangerous book you’ve never heard of https://t.co/urHQbA9z61 via @POLITICOMag pic.twitter.com/k6hCeijH2A

— POLITICO (@politico) December 12, 2016

Deal of the Day: 50% Off This Karcher Pro Series 3,200 PSI Gas-Powered Pressure Washer

At Amazon, Karcher G 3200 OCT 2.5 GPM 3200 PSI 196cc Gas Power Pressure Washer, Pro Series.

Also, Camco 57293 Deluxe Grilling Table.

Bonus: Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead.

America Has Already Gone John Galt

From Roger Simon, at PJ Media, "Who Needs Ayn Rand?":

Tell all your “Objectivist” friends and the libertarian gang at Reason magazine to break out the champagne. Americans may have skipped the movie of Atlas Shrugged, nor have many read any of Ayn Rand’s works, but they have taken the author’s advice anyway and gone John Galt, quitting the work force in record numbers. According to Zero Hedge, the latest figures show the labor participation rate at 35 year low.

Realistically, it’s even more than 35 because that figure reflects an employment bump when larger numbers of women joined the work force in the seventies and eighties. (They’re gone now, with or without Gloria Steinem.)

Currently a record 91.8 million Americans are no longer looking for work. That’s almost one and a half times the entire population of France.

Although I admit to libertarian tendencies, I don’t think any of us can celebrate because of this. It’s an economic disaster that should be blowing even Chris Christie off the front pages.

In fact, it’s much worse than that. It’s a human emotional disaster. Freud may have been wrong about a number of things, but he was right about this. Two mainstays that get us through life, other than religion, which Freud didn’t cotton to, are “love and work.” I don’t know about love, but the work part of our lives has been brutally kicked out from under us in the Obama years.

Continue reading.

HAT TIP: Theo Spark.

Barbara Branden Dies: Her Biography of Ayn Rand Sparked Rift in Objectivist Movement

A fascinating obituary.

At the New York Times, "Barbara Branden, Biographer of Ayn Rand, Dies at 84."

Fast Approaching the Stage of Rule by Brute Force

Via Zion's Trumpet, "Brute. Force. Rule. O’Hellno. Now. From D.C."

And see Ayn Rand, "The Nature of Government":

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.

Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.

Is Atlas Shrugging?

Via Glenn Reynolds, an interview with Harmon Kaslow, the producer of the film 'Atlas Shrugged, Part II', "Job Creators Are Giving Up on the U.S."

World Premiere Atlas Shrugged Part II

In Washington, D.C., via Reason.tv:

'Atlas Shrugged: Part II'

At Reason, "Atlas Shrugged Part II: Theatrical Trailer."

I think that "Going Galt" meme will pick up again if Obama's reelected.

'The Fountainhead'

I watched it on TCM this morning. What a movie. Wikipedia's entry is here.

Newsweek's 1957 Review of 'Atlas Shrugged'

From Cary Schneider and Sue Horton, at the Los Angeles Times, "Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged': What the critics had to say in 1957."

Newsweek

Gigantic, relentless, often fantastic, this book is definitely not one to be swallowed whole. Throughout its 1,168 pages, Miss Rand never cracks a smile. Conversations deteriorate into monologues as one character after another laboriously declaims his set of values. One speech, the core of the book, spreads across 60 closely written pages. Yet once the reader enters this stark, strange world, he will likely stay with it, borne along by its story and its eloquent flow of ideas.

There's a whole bunch of reviews there as well, from people you haven't heard of unless you're a real literary person. Most of them are not very favorable. Even Whittaker Chambers, at National Review, sniffed at it.

BONUS: At American Glob, "Liberals Don’t Get Ayn Rand."

Fake Journalist Joan Walsh Attacks Paul Ryan as 'Randian Poseur'

One of the most revealing progressive attacks against conservatives is that they're allegedly hypocrites for receiving government funding, through employment or benefits, or what not. Either that, or they have ties to conservative non-profits or think tank "wingnut welfare" organizations. Basically, you can't be against ever-expanding government on principle because you're on the government's dole. By that logic, anyone who works in government is a mere robot, an Orwellian automaton. The racist misogynist anti-Christian bigot TBogg of Firedoglake routinely attacks conservative professors along these lines, as if slavish obedience to leftist neo-socialism is a prerequisite for a teaching job. And now here comes the repugnant Salon sleazebag Joan Walsh smearing veep nominee Paul Ryan as free-market hypocrite and wingnut welfare freeloader who's worked his entire life in government. See, "Paul Ryan: Randian poseur" (via Memeorandum). Read it all at the link. I told Ms. Walsh how I felt about her slimeball hackery in Twitter, here and here.

BONUS: There's the added debate on whether Ryan's a full-on Ayn Rand acolyte. He may have been at one time, but he's apparently sworn off his ideological affinity for the late "Atlas Shrugs" author. He said, for example, that he ultimately rejected Rand's Objectivism as an "atheist philosophy" --- which makes sense, given that Ryan's Catholic. More at the Atlantic, "How to Tell Paul Ryan Wants to Be Veep: He's Rejected His Former Idol Ayn Rand."

Radical leftists despise Ayn Rand because she accurately explained the destruction of societies from the ravenous, rapacious maul of the endlessly mooching entitlement state. Paul Ryan wants to downsize the left's neo-socialist rape-culture government. And the progressives will do anything to stop him.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

VIDEO: Atlas Shrugged: Part II Greenlighted

I enjoyed Part I, so I'm looking forward to this:

PREVIOUSLY: "'Atlas Shrugged' Sequel Secures Financing, Production to Start in April."

Rising Fuel Costs Hit Air Travel, Consumers Hammered; Los Angeles Food Trucks Feeling Economic Pinch: Who's Next?

Vin Suprynowicz discussed the role of fuel prices in his review of "Atlas Shrugged." Gas was at $37.50 a gallon, so railroads became the most economical form of transportation. At those price passenger air travel would be 100 percent prohibitive. We're not there yet, but it's happening. See LAT, "Summer airfares may climb 15% from a year earlier":

As the summer travel season approaches, airline industry experts predict that soaring fuel prices and a sharp pickup in passenger demand will push airfares up 15% over a year earlier — to levels not seen since before the economic downturn.

Fare hikes have already begun, with six of the nation's largest airlines each raising rates at least five times since Jan. 1 for nearly all routes.

By the time the peak summer travel season rolls, travel industry experts predict, domestic airfares may reach an average of nearly $390, up from a low of $302 two years ago.

"We are definitely getting higher and higher and higher fares," said Tom Parsons, who runs the popular website BestFares.com. "They've been going up once or twice a month, a nickel here and a dime there."

And at the video, L.A.'s food truck business is getting hammered?

RELATED: From Pat Austin, "Is Atlas Shrugging Where You Are?"

Man's Rights

Well, with all the recent talk about "Atlas Shrugged," I've been skimming back over some of her writings. The novel is almost 1,100 pages, and I have no plans to re-read it (although I'm considering The Fountainhead for another round). I have been reading some of Rand's essays, for example, "Man's Rights", which is featured in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness. A sample:

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self- sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action-which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

More at the link.

Atlas is Shrugging in California

I probably should have avoided the movie reviews before seeing the new film version of Ayn Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. Rand's relentless affirmation of the individual against the state would be censored if today's socialist saboteurs of the economy had their way. And thus the reactions among the progressives --- while not unexpected --- were simply visceral in their condemnation. Of course the eternally angry Roger Ebert panned the film, but a bevy of other reviewers were only slightly less disgusted. Roy Edroso's piece is actually quite hilarious, but I doubt the diarists at Daily Kos have even read the book: If it's about the supreme morality of individualism and markets, then scoffs and guffaws attacking "greed" is about as sophisticated a response as you'll get. And other reviewers are just piling on by now, for example at Creative Loafing Atlanta, "Atlas Shrugged. Critics Deplored. Ideologues Flocked":

... it's a monumental piece of crap.

Left-wing propaganda? Perhaps. But when The Atlantic's Megan McArdle threw in the towel, herself a connoisseur of the free market, that sure seemed like a little much.

But just in the nick of time comes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, with a fabulous review, where he notes:

The best word to describe Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is … surprising. It’s surprisingly well-paced, surprisingly intelligent, surprisingly well-acted, and surprisingly entertaining. Perhaps most surprising of all, it has me thinking about re-reading the novel again. I would highly recommend it to friends and their families.

And he adds in an update:

I deliberately avoided reading reviews of the film until after I saw it first...

I'm not that disciplined, alas, but RTWT. And see also the outstanding piece by Vin Suprynowicz at the Las Vegas Review Journal. I'd quote it, but considering the Review Journal's a Righthaven partner, folks can just read it at the link.

I have to admit being a little disappointed in the film, a disappointment only partially influenced the left's anti-Randian diatribes. I just felt that it needed to be bigger somehow, bigger in reaching to the majesty of the novel. I know I'm idealistic. Atlas Shrugged is larger than life, especially life in these United States where to celebrate achievement and self-interest is to be attacked as a class warrior. (I know, it should be the other way around, but I just last week had debates with people who attacked conservatives as fomenting class warfare, strangely enough.) That said, I did like the movie. I liked it a lot. I think Taylor Schilling plays a perfect Dagny Taggart. Not too different from how I envisioned her. And the sleek cinematography was perfectly riveting. I know this is Part I of a trilogy, but the movie was short and I wanted more. I wish I could just go back out to see Part II this afternoon.

One thing I worried about was how well the filmmakers would be able to place the setting in present times, 2016, amid a crisis of severe economic dislocation (like we're having under the Obamacrats in D.C. and across the nation). After seeing the opening scenes, and thinking about it a bit more, the scenario of disappearing industrialists seems entirely accurate. Indeed, as I've been reporting here of late, in California we've got the same kind of wrecked economy that Ayn Rand inveighed against. The Los Angeles Times was touting the expansion of the tech sector in February --- 100,000 new jobs were created --- while burying the lede on lingering massive unemployment in the state. But then the March job numbers --- unemployment edged back up to 12.1 percent --- forced the paper to be more honest. And then this weekend the Orange County Register published a devastating piece on the exodus of 69 businesses from the state for the first quarter of 2011. Reading the top ten list of reasons for businesses bailing is a jaw-dropping experience, but one that I'm getting used to. Between Sacramento and Washington, California can't get a break. Indeed, state officials have taken a fact-finding trip to Texas in hopes of stemming the flow of jobs to the Longhorn State and elsewhere.

Let's hope it gets better. For the past two years, the old Sunset Ford dealership in Westminster has been vacant, a symbol of the depression-like marketplace that hammered key sections of the local economy. For more than 40 years Sunset Ford did business at the intersection of the 22 and 405 Freeways, and so it was a shock to see that enterprise close its doors in 2009. And despite the Obama administration's economic stimulus, the location remains idle, like a ghost town:

Here's the old Sunset Ford sign, in disuse with no indication of replacement, down the way along Garden Grove Boulevard next to the 22 Freeway. It's a constant reminder of a collapsed marketplace:

As I was returning home, I saw this fellow with his homeless sign at the Jamboree offramp at Interstate 5. Notice the sign asks not for handouts, but for help finding ANY work.

This was a couple of weeks ago, and later that afternoon I went shopping at the District in Tustin. Borders is closing its location there, one of the 200 stores nationwide going belly up:

They were unloading everything:

But copies of David Remnick's recent book on the Radical-in-Chief weren't moving so well, and that's at 60 percent off:

And elsewhere around the mall stores have had trouble staying open , so it's not just Borders over here:

And checking over at Jamboree and Main Street in Irvine, this copying business, MyPrint, consolidated with an equity firm and closed this location. The local printing market is pretty messed up:

A lot of commercial real estate available throughout the Irvine business district.

I'm not sure what this was, probably a restaurant. This is down by Lake Forest, off the 5 Freeway:

I haven't had a chance to update with more pictures over the last couple of weeks, and not for lack of material. That said, there's indeed some robust sectors of the economy, especially entertainment and high tech. But overall California's economy is stagnating, and it's not going to improve as long as Democrat-socialists continue to sabotage the business climate with high taxes to fund out-of-control spending.

Sounds like something out of a movie, or something.